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The War Between Russia And Ukraine
I read some comments which, if I understood them correctly, suggested that the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, and Ukraine's defiance and heroic effort to repel the invader, is, somehow, a failure to be blamed on the Orthodox Faith---represented by the Russian Orthodox Church and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.
In the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, several major wars were fought by European powers; some of the belligerents maintained Roman Catholicism as the established church of their peoples; some maintained Protestant denominations as the established religion of their respective peoples. In neither case did this suggest a failure of Roman Catholicism, or of the various and so-called Protestant denominations.
The Orthodox Faith, expressed by several autocephalous Churches, is not political: its loyalty is to the Kingdom of God and of His Christ; and not to any particular ideology, party, oligarcy, autocracy, republic, or democracy. Human beings, however, are capable of adhering to both Faith and politics, of one flavor or another. This does not reflect poorly on the Orthodox Faith; it merely reflects the reality of human life in this world.
Lenin and his cohorts in the Bolshevik party attempted to blame the Orthodox Faith for the ills which the Russian people suffered under the czarist monarchy. Nicholas II was obviously incapable of governing; and his choice of adninistrators and ministers to carry out his policies was, indeed, unfortunate. In retaliation, the Bolsheviks murdered many martyrs, both clergy and lay, of the Orthodox Church. Just recently I saw clips from a film---which I cannot identify (I am still working on that), although I believe it is of Soviet vintage---showing the martyrdom of the Czar's sister-in-law, along with several others (including the son of the Poet, K.R.), at Alapayevsk, the day after the Czar, his spouse, and his son and four daughters, were brutally murdered in the "House of Special Purpose" at Ekaterinburg the day before. Although the film is primitive by our standards, and silent as one would expect, the tossing of the victims into a mine pit, followed by two grenades dropped in after them, and the subsequent detonations, is chilling in its open depiction of this brutality. Although these murders allowed Lenin to carry out his primary motivation for the revolution, vengeance for the death of his brother, this reign of terror did not convince the Russian people that the Orthodox Faith had failed, or had failed them. Rather, it strengthened the truly Faithful, as such martyrdoms do (as observed by Tertullian centuries before, in the days of the Roman Empire.
Wallace Stevens suggested, in his Adagia, that war was the temporary failure of politics; and I think this adequately explains the current hostilities between Russia and the Ukraine, in which Russia is quite clearly the aggressor, the ravager, and the bully. However, war, politics, and any other human activity or institution cannot bring failure to the Orthodox Faith. The Bolsheviks understood this: it explains the fury and frenzy of their ferocity toward the Church.
Starward
